June Gloom

Not so gloomy for me. I welcome overcast diffusion rather than glaring heat and dust. I've never acclimated to my native L.A. My theory: you inherit ancestral blood; thousands of rainy Irish summers permeated my DNA, my circulation, my pale complexion.

If I had my preferences, I'd never have moved to my hometown. This contradictory remark betrays my wish for cooler climes. I find it easier to bundle up than take off, and I look better in bulk than bare. I wonder if Northern Europeans adapted to sartorial desires that made them lust and long after those mates similarly swaddled. Then I consider the stereotypical Scandinavian model, or recently post-glasnost her curvaceous Russian neighbors, and those images deflate my theoretical balloon.

The sun's out earlier today, so halfway through the month that often finds the marine layers persisting despite the solstice's nearness, it may be over for the ten days or so that's been "unseasonably" below the average temperature. When I'd driven to pick up Leo from his school tucked at the base of the mountain range twelve miles north, it's been drizzling or misty up there each time. I keep washing my car, confident I'll never see another cloud until November, and then it keeps showering-- always precisely enough to smear my car with dirt dislodged but never with enough water to sweep away the emissions-darkened urban grime.

Last summer, the same summer this picture was taken by "Kevin Collins 123," we visited Cambria; Layne and I walked above the coast in a sanctuary that a month or two before must have been bursting with lavender or wildflowers, early enough to beat the sun's daily conquest on its frontier where it battled the eternal sea.

Then, we drove up to San Francisco. Staying across the street from Buena Vista Park, the bay's view may have been not so "good," but I enjoyed the chance to wear my UCLA sweatshirt on morning walks while watching the fog lift slowly, hoping it would not end before my hour-long, rather strenuous trek three times around. It's a natural workout in this tilted corona under a miniature forest, given a circle that tipped up the hill and down, a route placed on the slope like an off-balance table holding a stain left by the ring of a coffee-cup; you trudged up and down the skewed elevation as you circled around the base of the hill the park surmounts. Many of those resident there, however, must have found this wearying in their perambulations up and down from the attractions of the Haight, marking the park's northern border.

I also remember, the day we left Mount Hermon on that same vacation, getting even on the morning of July 4th for the first time ever in California to wear my sweatshirt at least in the morning, on my final breakfast outside under the redwoods. It did get hotter soon, nearly ten degrees as soon as we left the arboreal cover on the tiny hill that calls itself a Mount, a couple hundred feet above the riparian plain, for the flat heat that, as we drove south, steadily rose with every mountain range we topped until the numbers neared a hundred, when they'd started in the low seventies on that protected peninsula off the Coast Range above Santa Cruz. We live so far inland that we never see a seagull, never sniff the salt breeze, never feel the drop in the air that signals when the ocean, even if still unseen, nears. That's why I cannot see growing old in palm-treed arid L.A., although Layne fears if our dream comes true that we'll shrivel and shiver as we wither amidst dripping pines.

Wikipedia reports that this term's indeed a local one; I'd never heard, however, its predecessor "May Grey." The entry concludes: "June Gloom has been reported by some Californians to bring on symptoms consistent with seasonal affective disorder. It is often cited as a time of depression." For me, however, reverting back to atavisitic patterns of comfort, I embrace the chance to wear a sweatshirt so close to my birthday, a time just after the year's longest day that always brings to mind sweltering ovens of baking furnaces, smog and sun and weary dog days if five weeks before Sirius the Dog Star's zenith at the arrival of the Perseid meteor showers.

Wikimedia photo caption: "Coastal clouds hovering over Southern California around 1:48PDT on June 12, 2008. Such clouds are involved in a weather pattern known as June gloom that occurs in late spring and early summer."

"Head on, Feet on": Kosher & "Buddhist style" chicken

"Young Chicken. Free Range, Raised without growth stimulants. No added antibiotic. Buddhist style: Head On. Feet On." Label for "gà Vikon: A Heritage Chicken" that I cooked recently. I never saw a dead chicken with head and feet, but Layne told me that's how they'll be now.

Perhaps thanks to the anti-caged hens law we passed when (other) voters defeated the same-sex marriage proposition last fall here in California. The juxtaposition of more voters approving birds' rights than gay rights infuriated activists. Still, perhaps pleasing Peter Singer's "animal liberation" supporters and my vegan neighbors, we can see how a concern for human dignity need not and should not cancel out ethical treatment of how we care for the animals we depend upon for food. (I see today's paper has PETA bemoaning the century-old custom of tossing high dead fish at Pike Place Market in Seattle, which to me goes a bit too far; they ask if "dead cats" were hurled if we'd applaud, and I admit I might given my gallows humor.)

That picture you see above's on the bags of the two chickens Layne had bought, cheaply and grown in Azusa a few miles from the Alhambra Asian market she shopped at. See a brown, rather resolute fowl standing, or slightly strolling, amidst a green lawn's otherwise flat and undifferentiated expanse. Not likely to have been our chicken's last sight, given the industrial and dusty nature of my native San Gabriel Valley. Still, the reminder of "Free range" did coincide with the stated intention of the plurality of Golden State's electorate to allow chickens more room to roam before we grabbed them for eggs, or hauled them off to decapitate and cook.

The eyes of both chickens were glazed over by skin of sorts, a membrane that reminded me of a fetal being. I'd been musing about kashering and Buddhism both as I prepared the dinner, reflecting on our weakness that needs animals to die so we can live. Nothing deep or profound, as my Corgi watched me with eyes glinting more brightly than the knife I honed. But, I am trying to become more aware of what I do. Then, as I considered such issues, I saw for the first time the writing on the label, leading down to "Buddhist style: Head on. Feet on." I figured it was some sort of sign, bibliomancy on a bag.

I did it wrong, of course. The feet had been tucked into the skin somehow, and my dear wife chastised me on her return when I'd only cut part of the legs off. I figured culpable ignorance this first time out. Their heads came off with difficulty, if no more than turkey necks I'd had to sever, or chicken necks I twisted off by the dozens in a college summer job deboning vast amounts of fowl boiled the previous night so as to be disassembled by my hand at the meat-pie restaurant every morning. I can still take the meat off of a chicken practically blindfolded, separating fat from skin from meat and bones mechanically, if manually.

Talk about minimum wage, unskilled labor; I got the job in the midst of Reaganomics at the state unemployment agency across from ironically named Easy Street in El Monte one sweltering summer. Down the same street from the Asian market, if directly prior to the massive influx of immigration the past twenty-five years that would change the Valley from blue-collar white and Latino to many more Latinos and Asians. The whites and Asians demographically and suddenly switched; the Latino population kept growing. The only white person for miles even then, I had to walk from my house to the office down a boulevard belying its French inspiration past stucco shops and asphalt vistas in shimmering June heat that marked the Valley as a downscale wasteland; as a college student on grants and work-study, I had no car.

In school and in college, I'd always had to walk or bike or take the bus. On another level of austerity, I'd never had to dissect animals, given parochial destitution. So, this chopping off of feet and neck-head meant a sharp blade and fast instruction. Why should a bird's dead eyes move me more or less than those of a fish, the eye of which we tossed to the Corgi during our meal a few days before the chicken dinner?

Associations: thinking as I was why the apropos if un-clannish surname "Turnbull" in Seán Ó Riordáin's existentialist, unsettling encounter in his Irish-language poem that came to mind unbidden yesterday as I walked along on a break from work. I used my schoolboy Gaelic as a mental leash (Beckett's French a predecessor however rarified!) for my tugging English. I wondered:why should I "see" the eyes of one animal I eat differently than any other?

As the poet puts it, first in his Irish, then in Gabriel Fitzmaurice's translation of "Malairt" ["A Change"]:

'Gaibh a leith,' arsa Turnbull, 'go bhfeice tú an brón
I súilibh an chapaill,
Dá mbeadh crúba chomh mór leo sin fútsa bheadh brón
Id shúilibh chomh maith leis.'

Agus b'fhollas gur thuig sé chomh maith sin an brón
I súilibh an chapaill,
Is gur mhachnaigh chomh cruaidh sin gur tomadh é fá dheoidh
In aigne an chapaill.

D'fhéachas ar an gcapall go bhfeicinn an brón
'Na shúilibh ag seasamh,
Do chonac súile Turnbull ag féachaint im threo
As cloigeann an chapaill.

D'fhéachas ar Turnbull is d'fhéachas air fá dhó
Is do chonac ar a leacain
Na súile rómhóra a bhí balbh le brón--
Súile an chapaill.
-------
"Come over," said Turnbull, "and look at the sorrow
In the horse's eyes.
If you had hooves like those under you,
There would be sorrow in your eyes."

And 'twas plain that he knew the sorrow so well
In the horse's eyes,
And he wondered so deeply that he dived in the end
Into the horse's mind.

I looked at the horse then that I might see
The sorrow in his eyes,
And Turnbull's eyes were looking at me
From the horse's mind.

I looked at Turnbull and looked once again
And there in Turnbull's head--
Not Turnbull's eyes, but, dumb with grief,
Were the horse's eyes instead.

"Brón," sorrow or sadness, repeats five times. Relate this to the fallen shell within which live sparks try to rise in Kabbalah; the "dukkha" or suffering permeating Buddhist teaching of the unsatisfied flesh. Out of such meditations, such confrontations demand compassion: Irish and Jewish and Buddhist and secular all sift with my ancestral Catholicism. I suppose my worldview deepens as my contradictions accumulate. Such may be maturity, as this month I will near closer the half-century mark; my bones begin to ache often with intimations of my next fifty years best or worst. Our bodily appetites never cease. Maybe, as all traditions tell us, we can start to control them, to master them. I try this now and then by thinking in halting Irish rather than my glib English.

Turnbull's eerie exchange comes to mind often when paralleled with my own witness on a Donegal road two Junes ago with a dirty sheep in a trailer looking back at me with its direct gaze. "Hooves under me," I had been trudging a silent hike in a threatening dusk, relief from my Irish-immersion classes, but I was talking to myself in Gaeilge to test my travel-weary memory and acclimate myself within the lunar, treeless, scoured, storm-lashed Gaeltacht landscape. Silence nearly total.

At that "insight," although on my trip already I'd not eaten meat since the chicken (that or beef) on the plane over, I vowed to pull back from what I craved, as a meat-and-potatoes guy. I'd once loved shrimp and pork chops, bacon if not ham. I gave those up nearly twenty years ago. When in Ireland, I tended not to eat any meat, to test myself and put that "fence around the Torah" observance of this one obligation at least. In a land of little kosher, it reminded me of what I've chosen to control.

For, I craved meat. I still eat it, no salad days for me, but no longer at least from four-foots. If I want more bipeds inside me, I must learn to chop heads and look at eyes. By this task, I assume a bit of responsibility for my actions.

I turned out, I admit, a delicious meal. Layne's instructions e-mailed to me I figured she'd garnered from a cookbook. But, it's her off-the-cuff culinary genius!

My wife sent me these directions which I copy for your inspiration and perhaps imitation:

This will show you how to remove heads and feet:
["How to Butcher a Chicken" blogsite.]
Try it with sharpest kitchen sheers. [sic: shears. Editor's note.]

heat oven 325 [I'd say 350 but she--"the meat's too dry"-- disagrees with me and the boys.]
There is a zip lock bag with long green Chinese chives. Snip some of these with scissors into 1/4 slices--about 1 1/2 cups, add about 1/2 cup garlic cloves and 2 sliced lemons and 1 tablespoon of salt, 1/2 t pepper and stuff chicken cavity. Melt half cube of butter and add juice of one lemon. Brush this on chicken and sprinkle with salt, pepper and a little paprika. Should bake about 1 hour.

The link is to a lively (blogsite rather than a video) from "Herrick Kimball, inventor of the world famous Whizbang Chicken Plucker" who in ten steps takes you through the chicken butchering process. Nobody who lives among animals made food stays sentimental long, any more than in a morgue, on a hospital staff, or in the police force. The crew looks quite happy in their work, and I'm reminded of my dad telling me how he saw a chicken running around with its head cut off as a boy, or our babysitter taking Leo as a toddler on the bus to nearby Chinatown to buy a live chicken from the store with, what else, a giant rooster adorning its facade, like an idol perching among the jolly buddhas and pagodas there. Perhaps his ancestors followed the shetl custom of "kapporot" when a person's sins are transferred to a fowl (rooster or hen depending on the sinner's sex) who's swung around one's head near the arrival of Yom Kippur. Said bird's then donated to the poor. Eat well before you fast. Moderation, not excess; don't starve yourself too much, but don't stuff yourself. Again, there's a subtly ethical concern in this ritual, as with kashrut and "Buddhist style" slaughter.

I'm re-reading, after fifteen years when it appeared, Rodger Kamenetz' "The Jew in the Lotus," about the historic encounter of a rabbinical delegation with the Dalai Lama in October 1990. I was learning about Judaism when I read it originally; now I am adding an interest in Buddhism that builds upon my longstanding interest in Tibet. Perhaps that will illuminate a dietary intersection between the two traditions. Already, Blu and Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg in their Indian travels with Kamenetz and the minyan (if not for Orthodox--part of the problems that plague their negotiations!) of delegates encounter difficulties in staying Torah-true to their version of Modern Orthodox kosher, as opposed to their liberal brethren. Even vegetarian may not suffice, for the oils and preparations may mix with other foods in their prepared vessels. Arriving in Dharamsala, however, to their delight, the Greenbergs find the Tibetans have kashered their kitchen totally according to exacting directions sent ahead of their entourage.

I admire the Greenbergs, for going hungry on a flight since the Brahmin meal served may not meet their halakhic standards shows no small adherence to discipline on an arduous journey. Yet, as Kamenetz subtly shows, the challenge of the whole meeting with the Dalai Lama also rests in the visiting Jews' self-control not to take charge of every situation for dialogue, but to learn to step back and listen and understand. This respect, nonetheless, can clash in turn with Jewish prohibitions on idolatry and consorting with "pagan" practices. So, even in this meeting, rigidity remains for some a paramount concern, for how else, some reason, will Jews survive a diaspora among the heathens. Out of their lessons, perhaps the Tibetans will learn how to endure exile. But, can they sustain tension between fidelity and flexibility?

Kamenetz cites a young woman's view of Judaism: "An old man saying no." Restriction, as any parent or teacher learns, beats permission. There's a general belief I'm sure my vegan neighbors would share that Buddhism eschews meat. In fact, as the Tibetans show by practicality in their arid homeland, this restriction did not become universal among practitioners. Last month, I reviewed here (and on Amazon US) Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse's "What Makes You 'Not' A Buddhist"-- this Bhutan-based teacher tells us early on that "eating meat" does not keep you from being a Buddhist, but in his conclusion, he informs us that one must not kill any animal. So, I'm not sure; Buddha's monks could receive meat as alms if the animal had not been killed especially for them.

As with Torah, perhaps later Buddhist restrictions grew as debate ensued and laxity loomed. Layne and I discussed after going to temple last week how boring the parshah was, how full of minutiae about the clan of Gershom having their tabernacle tasks assigned. Out of this, she suggested, we can see the truth of the Torah: if the Hebrews had been only concerned with grand narratives and origin myths passing as reality, they'd not have included these dull bits of legalisms and bickering.

I'm sure these discussions, over two-and-a-half thousand years in both cases, resulted in splits and factions and rivalries. Oddly similar to Judaism, Buddhism lacks much "original" textual lore about its purported first teacher to bicker over; the life of Buddha's probably about as scanty as the veracity of Moses. The bulk comes after those who follow such men hash out the details. After the revelation at the deer park, the fire sermon, the theophany at Sinai, the Decalogue's simplicity, the texts begin to surround the original documents, the pithy commandments, the four noble this and the eightfold that.

Out of this, we find kosher expanded and meat also accepted or denied. And, eventually, the Dalai Lama insisting that if science proves rebirth wrong, the belief must capitulate to reason. And, eventually, the rabbis designing ways to stay "Torah-true" in an electrical age with Rube Goldberg devices, inventions as ingenious as those for Sabbath-compliant ovens, but such are the necessities of keeping a faith alive for centuries amidst pressing daily anxiety.

Website and source of photo: Vikon Chicken Farm, Azusa. Translation & original poem by Seán Ó Riordáin (1917-77). "Malairt"/ "A Change": Gabriel Fitzmaurice, "Poems I'd Wish I'd Written: Translations from the Irish" (Indreabhán, Co. na Gaillimhe, Éire: Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 1996): 38-9.

Céline's "Guignol's Band": Book Review

I found this a letdown. Like two earlier reviewers, I agree that the book loses a lot in translation. You'd think that it wouldn't be difficult, somehow, given those influenced by Céline in English, to channel the Henry Miller-proto-Kerouac pre-Pynchon meets Tom Wolfe breathless style of fulminating invective, mad rushes of detail, and scatalogical uproariousness from French. But, I guess it is.

The best scenes are at start and finish; without them this would have earned two stars as a maybe. The bombing of the Orleans bridge in WWI begins the tale "in medias res" and sparks great energy. But, soon the narrative and its semi-autobiographical protagonist dissipate in London, amid the usual crowd of no-good-niks, and the doldrums set in despite the typical pace that Céline tries to set up and keep going. Clodo and Cascade, who sound out of Beckett, lure the narrator into the underworld, and while the dealings in rough trade and smuggling do entertain, they fail to lift the escapades to the level of "Death on the Installment Plan" or "Journey to the End of Night" (both reviewed by me on Amazon US). It may always be a problem with Céline, as perhaps with the Beats and Miller, when basing so much of their work on themselves: even they had periods of comparative lassitude, in life and on paper, I suppose.

These persist in the novel even though it tries to move at fever pitch on every page. After a while, you tire even as the narrator never flags. This disjunction between daredevil events and prosaic overload wears you down as the reader; perhaps in French or a better translator, such a lack of fit between intended momentum and actual complacence would not be?

The middle section with pawnbroker Claben has its moments, but they got rather tedious after dozens of pages with little happening despite the effort. The last part, forty pages before the end, roused my attention with the sudden introduction of de Rodiencourt awash in fables of Tibetan mines and magic flowers. The book breaks off without warning, and picks up in what was only published in English over five decades later as "London Bridge." Still, as a faithful reader of Céline bit by bit, I'll be wanting more of de Rodiencourt, so I will continue with that adventure!
{Posted to Amazon US 5/18-09}

"Merton & Buddhism": Book Review

This anthology collects scholarly essays; it's an accessible volume that, like its inspiration, wears its learning lightly. Merton's example of enthusiasm, earnestness, and erudition finds fitting followers in those tracking his geographical and spiritual searches eastward.

Roger Corless begins with a brisk overview of Buddhism, and Bonnie B. Thurston follows with a survey of the book's subject. James Wiseman treats Merton's engagement with Theravada Buddhism, and Judith Simmer-Brown with Tibetan. Ruben Habito's Zen essay teaches the reader first what Zen is, and then he and John P. Keenan examine Merton's limited understanding, dependent on his 1960s reading of D.T. Suzuki's over-intellectual, under-spiritual emphasis.

Articles on Merton's artistic incorporation follow. Roger Lipsey looks at the Merton-Suzuki-Zen triangle from the calligraphic angle, the drawings Merton admired and then made himself. Photography gains similar treatment from Paul Pearson, and poetry from Thurston. Footnotes from those who had visited with Merton on his final Asian journey the fall of 1968 and a bibliography complete this work.

More than one contributor wonders if Merton achieved "satori" or the awakening he desired very shortly before he died. Most writers here assume that Merton would have gone for an extended retreat and Dzongchen practice under Tibetan auspices; I wonder how this would have been approved by his Trappist order? Perhaps Merton departed at the right moment for him if too soon for the rest of us. He appears, after overcoming the temptation to court nurse "M." in later 1966, to have recovered his balance and the Buddhist encounters he undertook, that fulfilled so much he'd been studying for and meditating upon in the 60s, seem to have been his dream come true. Still, as his companion on the trip Harold Talbott told "Tricycle" in 1992: "he would have never left the Church." (qtd. 22) The tension, however, between his longing to enter advanced Tibetan practice and the Catholicism within which he still vowed himself to fidelity must have been difficult for his situation around him, even as within himself, as Lipsey's essay with its careful quotes from throughout Merton's writings over the decades documents best, Merton may have solved the conundrum beneath theological distinctions between theism and apophatic "awareness."

Throughout, this volume rewards the careful reader and subtle scholar. Those eager to find out what Merton knew and could not know about Buddhism under the conditions of his time and place will welcome these reflections. Despite some inevitable repetition of points from overlapping observers, essays that often in their tone go on a bit too long or too casually, and a few typographical (Keenan's essay lacks vowels for transliterated terms, perhaps intentionally, but they loom quite foreign on the English page) errors, this collection corrects and complements the "Zen and the Birds of Appetite" Suzuki-focused volume Merton wrote along with "Mystics & Zen Masters" before his sudden death on his Asian pilgrimage.

P.S. It's listed on Amazon US with the same ISBN & pagination but a different cover variation and subtitle: either "Realizing the Self" or "Wisdom, Emptiness & Ordinary Life." (Review already posted 5/22/09 on Amazon US.)

Paul Scott's "The Jewel in the Crown": Book Review

"The Raj Quartet" dwarfs even Tolstoy in length; like him, Scott wanders where minds captured within historical events and longing bodies yearn for understanding and release. He contrasts the English view of dividing heaven from earth with the Hindus for whom "the material world is illusory and Heaven a name for personal oblivion." (75) Lady Lili Chatterjee continues: "on this difficult journey from illusion to oblivion 'anything' counts as practical, because everything is speculative."

Out of such contradictions and resolutions, Indians, both British and native, must find reasons to carry out or shirk their duties, as administrators, soldiers, compromisers, rebels, or comforters, during WWII. Scott brings us behind the scenes as suspects are interrogated, idealists silenced, and dissenters tracked down. The Japanese have defeated the Crown in Burma, the Congress Party in India has fomented uprisings while Gandhi seeks withdrawal of troops and non-violent non-cooperation with the Empire. Scott explores a handful of characters reacting to two vicious attacks on Englishwomen, the elderly Miss Crane and the young Miss Manners, from various angles, altering his prose style subtly or dramatically, as an unnamed, unseen narrator collates these testimonies.

Scott's craft's amazing. He can create sinously periodic sentences that build up magisterially, or simple prose that transmits Indian versions of English pithily. He notes how in English, the written word attains flexibility, confidence, and evasion; "a way of gaining time and winning confidence." (217) But spoken, it's crueler. Hindi's spareness, by contrast, adds beauty missing from English, which " cannot be called truthful because its subtleties are infinite." Out of such elusive speech of the conqueror learned perforce by those ruled who must deal with the Crown's forces of law or arms, Scott builds his saga.

It's not romantic. A returning Hindu, educated in English public school, recoils at his native land's filth. Kumar reflects on a scene outside the hovel to which he's returned as a young man. Scott cleverly allows us, therefore, to see in an acculturated Indian's eyes the same scenes the same way that the British also view poverty when they come to this struggling land.

"The milkman comes in the morning and milks his cow outside the house, near a telegraph pole. To this pole he ties a dead, stuffed calf which the cow nuzzles. This keeps her in milk. The calf was starved to death because the cow's milk was taken by the milkman to sell to good Hindus. Since I knew that, I take only lemon or lime in my tea when Aunt Shalini can get them from the bazaar." (243)

You also get a sense of the differences of India, of course, from the British characters. Miss Manners confides: "Behind all the chatter and violence of India-- what a deep lingering silence. Siva dances in it. Vishnu sleeps in it. Even their music is silence. It's the only music I know that sounds conscious of 'breaking' silence, of going back into it when it's finished, as if to prove every man-made sound is an illusion." (476) From these types of thoughts, the actions that the British and Indians engage in, violent, heroic, compromised, or confused, arise. Necessity, the pressure of war and revolt, and the demands to do something make all those whom Scott introduces complicit in the failed enterprise that was colonial India.

There's an analogy that sums this up. Scott as a military man in India captures in Brigadier Reid's memoir sharply the precise, pedantic, composed tone of officials he must have known intimately during this period. Travelling in a car, he notes how:

"My batman was a Hindu, but the driver was a Muslim. I thought how salutary a lesson it was to those who talked so readily of 'differences' that in the car there could be found-- travelling in perfect amity-- a representative of each of the three main 'powers' in India-- Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. The journey itself, however, seemed endless. In the dark, with all these troubles freshly behind me I pondered the immensity, the strangely compelling beauty of India." (336-7)

Reid's tone shifts between the obvious symbol, the Englishman's materialism, and his straining towards what he cannot as easily articulate, what distinguishes the mystery at the core of this plot. In all of its perspectives, all of its reports, we still close it wondering. Perhaps the next three books will bring us closer to solutions, or perhaps, given the collapse of British hegemony after the war, not.

(Posted today to Amazon US. Citations from Everyman's 2007 ed. paired with "The Day of the Scorpion." A demanding, but engrossing prose saga worth the concentration.)

Before the Big Bang: "ex nihilo" or eternal, cyclical Void?

John Milton opposed the "ex nihilo" theory; recently two cosmologists advance an "ekpyrotic" or cyclical model of our universe that's always been imploding and expanding. No Creator, no anthropic principle that sets us up as evolved by the Divine to marvel at His Universe, and no worries about how time or space began. Believers, such as Milton then or a few now, may find such a theory more compatible with assumptions that nothing could emanate from nothing, even by an Almighty, and that perhaps rather than a God who made us so we could praise His Creation and find our fulfillment within this "ex nihilo" universe, we may be living and dying in an endless circle that every few trillion years also ends and begins, eternally. Akin, of course, more to conventionally Eastern swirls rather than Western linear directives.

I find such speculations fascinating, and while no physicist, I've long struggled through studies on the topic of origins. I also find here intersections with theology instructive; Gerald Schroeder plotted in his 1991 "Genesis & the Big Bang" a secular six-days-as-stages over eons equivalent overlay for the six-day creation. He combined the biblical languages and Torah with science in a way that I suspect few scholars since, say, Milton, may have been able to do, and Milton for all his erudition never saw the Hubble Space Telescope or quantum theory. Still, as Milton found himself in trouble once again for his refusal to accept "ex nihilo," and many skeptics as well as most scientists presumably by definition would eschew the miraculous allied with even the Omnipotent Prime Mover and First Cause, methods that try to align our soul's yearnings with our mind's cautions seem scarce when it comes to outlasting passing fancies, theological explanations ignorant of pre-Copernican let alone Planck constructs, uncertainty principles, and cosmological advances.

Contrarily, the neo-atheists Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins dutifully deny any marriage of science to its former queen of knowledge, theology. They often dismiss any good religious adherents have accomplished; they insist that secular ideals could inspire similar ethics free of guilt, oppression, or coercion. Having dethroned theology after the Middle Ages, rationalists refuse to reconcile cosmological models with "sky-god" origin myths.

The Talmud claims: "God roams among 18,000 worlds." I know Kabbalah interpreters have dabbled with such reconciliations now, with the Ein Sof and the unknowable essence beyond divine emanations, and talk of light and shattered vessels and recovered fragments of glimmer providing tantalizing hints. Hints that make me wonder if even scientifically ignorant shepherds and desert-dwelling scribes (much derided by Hitchens and Dawkins) inherited Wordsworthian or Neo-Platonic types of yearnings that point, as with Eden and Eve, back tens of thousands of years to some fundamental insight instilled in humans at the dawn of self-consciousness that tells, somehow, where we came from and how our world burst into being. Yet, you can see by such imagination, that I fall here from empiricism back into supposition.

Yet, these ambitious explanations trying to reconcile heartfelt yearnings of divine reunion for a fallen creation or a sundered humanity with the constants of numbers may seem, as always in our standoff between the Enlightenment of Reason and the Enlightenment of the Soul, doomed to be apart. We find in the tension between Collins and Dawkins our own split selves. It's a psychomachia. We're divided within our psyche, two partners as ornery and as yoked as our body and spirit, our heart vs. our mind. I note in passing: Stephen Unwin's book "The Probability of God" uses five Bayesian mathematical models to arrive at apparently 67%!

I reviewed Francis Collins' "The Language of God," on Amazon US along with those four neo-atheists, and found his assertion that in DNA coils a divine plan far less persuasive than the latter quartet's rejoinders; I've kept a very open mind towards all in this perpetual disputation. Atheists who remind us how in God's plan we have "kluges" or jerry-built inelegant solutions to biological problems a half-baked rather than gourmet level of care raise objections that I have not found matched by compelling deist rejoinders. "Mysterious Ways" may work for a U2 title, but for a theodicy, I find the tune grates on my own jutting, whorlish, curiously evolved ears.

I find the anthropic fallback that we cannot have been created with love and wonder unless a Creator meant us to share His qualities with a grateful and co-dependent congregation of us as believers inspiring, but not persuasive. Much as I sympathize with Teilhard de Chardin's mystical culmination of a singularity that brings into the noosphere the union of created with Creator, even that Jesuit paleontologist's splendid vision may not nudge me logically towards a position closer to theologians. My heart may still move in the direction of the faithful, eager for proof of belief, but my brain, as predictably, follows my training to not take the Bible as a history book, or a scriptural story as proof-text for a scientific quest for elusive truth.

Tony Bailie's ""Zen & the Art of Astrophysics" post June 2, 2009 alerted me to "Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang" by Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok. (I saw in upcoming summer books another from Brian Clegg, "Before the Big Bang," which excites me!) Bailie and I agree that in such encounters of the spirit and the concrete, the mathematical and the speculative, we may be groping towards a Unified Theory That Explains It All, or sort of, given our obtuseness and ignorance about what Beckett belittled as "always the big questions," and our tiresome "big answers." Perhaps we are meant to languish in culpable ignorance, but those who insist that prelapsarian myths need not keep us away from the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge appear, in science if not always in schools or houses of the holy, to prove otherwise.

Steinhardt and Turok propose the cyclical model as an alternative that may solve what the Big Bang paradigm accepted for the last half-century has not been able to figure out. By removing the problem of accounting for a start or finish, they sidestep the Big Bang expanding forever[***] or collapsing into One Big Crunch. Rather, in a flash, literally, every few eons, it ends and begins again. Their cyclical model may also account better for what's been elaborated since the acceptance of the Big Bang-- such as gravitational fields, dispersion of even material in less than a nanosecond after the Bang across the universe all at once, string theory, and why dark matter and dark energy seem to make up most of our universe.

From the nineteen reviewers at Amazon US, Steve Koss (1/3/08) sums up this 2007 book best:

In a book that challenges its readers' scientific capacity while remaining within a layman's grasp, Steinhardt and Turok eschew the Big Bang singularity for what they term an ekpyrotic or cyclic model. Derived from underlying principles of advanced string theory, they posit our universe as a three-dimensional brane that co-exists with another, mostly parallel brane of more or less equal size. The two branes are separated along an unseen fourth dimension, although the distance of this separation is small and alone among all known physical forces, only gravity can travel this fourth dimension and exert an attractive force between the branes. The authors use this model to posit a trillion-year process in which the branes collide and then separate to their maximum distance apart. During the collision, a birth process for both universes takes place in a manner that looks like the Big Bang. Radiation gradually gives way to matter, allowing stars and galaxies to form, until finally dark matter exerts itself and accelerates the universes' growth and spreads out the galaxies. The branes then become increasingly flat and parallel (as opposed to having been wrinkled but not intersecting as a result of their last collision), allowing the interbrane (gravitational) force between them to begin pulling them back together for another collision.

I've been making a very slow progress in a work similar to Tony's immersion in "Endless Universe" alongside a book on Zen by a pioneering popularizer of Buddhism in Britain, Christmas Humphreys. With a few dense pages at a time when I have no distractions, almost as if I meditate, I'm facing "Beckett & Zen" by Paul Foster, a formidably challenging work on two immensely difficult conceptions, one from that fearlessly inquisitive but honestly unbelieving writer, one from millennia of authors known and unknown also distinguished for their refusal to speak but of the ultimately Unnam[e]able, of our fragile place in this enigmatically silent universe.

Foster borrows the image employed by the once-fashionable other British pioneering popularizer of Buddhism, Alan Watts, who suggests that we are like two faces on opposite sides of a coin, subject-object attempting to figure each other out. Stuck in this binary opposition, the "coin's faces" wind up failing to realize the thickness, the whatness, the "quidditas" of the coin's hidden dimension. (This term, borrowed from Aristotle's Greek, was employed by Scholastic philosophers in the Middle Ages. A salutary reminder to even the neo-atheists that we cherish knowledge wherever it rests, under whatever guise, on whichever shelf.)

This third, unseen dimension for Watts (if not Beckett's searcher, dim-bulb as we all are "Watt") equally runs in both-- and permeates all-- directions inside the coin to unite its two sides. The two sides do not know of another way out; locked side-by-side but on opposite ends, they lack understanding of unseen unity. A new perspective extends the coin's definition beyond obverse-reverse dichotomies. This awakening may then truly join us to what we live within but we mistake as without.

Foster tackles the definition of the Void, and corrects earlier Beckett critics who misunderstood this notionless notion as if synonymous with nihilism. A Zen practitioner, Foster argues that the Void nears more Nirvana or better, what's beyond that extinguishment of categories or oppositions that we can conjure up from our Cartesian dilemma, this subject-object divide that traps us in "samsara" and prevents us from attaining awakening into "samadhi" that in Buddhist philosophy will eventually pull the disciplined and undeluded seeker into realization of release from our body-mind problem. Liberation that allows neither God nor universe, self nor soul. Perhaps an indescribable realm, but we are scared because we stay ignorant, small, and frail. Beckett's terrain crawls with stammering, cowed figures.

I wonder, then how the Void that Foster finds Beckett and his characters wrestling with-- Jacob in an endless night battle with his assailant angel, dawn breaking not with deliverance but death-- fits into this cyclical universal model? The place that we may "know" or posit that we cannot grasp. It's in this seeking that a Buddhist tries to reach the breakthrough beyond time and space, mind or body. Perhaps this can be an analogy dimly echoing this Big Splat, this spiralling and colliding universal, eternal dance of not the spheres but these ethereal planes, these branes?

The other universe, the other brane near our own universe that by "quidditas" or whatness lies nearly at our own point of entry but which has been pulled apart from us by our own incomprehension or inarticulation to utter it and to frame in words what cannot be perceived let alone conceived within language. Out of this encounter we cannot witness for in it lies our own formation and annihilation, we can't help but look back and wonder where we came from. This irreconciliable search for our meaning, our purpose, our existence fits neatly with Beckett's own bold if quixotic quest, to explore what we cannot explain but what we're compelled to attain. That is, what makes us human inside impels us to try to escape our human limitations.

Photo: Only 450 light years away, this planetary nebula is known as NGC 7293, or the "Helix Nebula." This 'eye in the sky' provides an anthropomorphic, or perhaps theomorphic, image to gaze back at. Meister Eckhardt mystically mused over a century before Copernicus: "The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love."-- Sermon IV

[***]P.S. For the Big Fade, see Dennis Overbye, 6/3/08, NY Times. "Dark, Perhaps Forever."

Foighne a dhéanamh

Feicim crobhaing bláthanna ar deic uachtar lé déanaí. Tá mé ag suí ina gcathair suaimhneas thuas an staighre. Éistim go ciuin anois agus ansin ag timpeall agamsa.

Déanann crobhaing bláthanna de bougainvillea. Níl ábalta ag scríobh seo focal as Gaeilge, mar bhfuil na bláthanna teochrios. Ach, tá siad go hiontach anseo!

Tá bláfar ag pléascadh leis corcairdhearg ag imeall ar deic. Fásann i lár na bláfar leis pistil bhán fós. Ceanglaíonn siad a tabhairt radharc lonrach.

Éitlaíonn dordéin go minic. Cuireann siad cuairt na lár na bláfar. Faigheann dordéin neachtar istigh na bláfar. Ar scor ar bith, ní fheiceann mé an mílseacht.

Tá an taisce a chur i bhfolach dom máguaird. Is cosuil é ormsa féin sa domhan nádúr. Iarraim ag oscailt ríocht rúin.

Foghlaim ní bhfuil ag foghlaim ach níos lu faoi domhan ar gach taobh an garraí inniu. Ní insíonn crannái piobar agus leamhán agus siacarandaí. Léim i mo fhoclóir: "lúi leis an áthas agat; do chroí a chur in aít chonáithe; do shuaimneas a cheapadh." Tá trí ciallaí leis brí amháin. (Aistrim as Béarla de réir sin.)

"To keep one's patience."

I see a bouquet of flowers on the upper deck lately. I'm sitting in a soft chair upstairs. I listen quietly now and then all around me.

The bouquet's made of bougainvillea flowers. I'm not able to write this word in Irish, since the flowers are tropical. But, they're wonderful now!

The blossom bursts with purple surrounding the deck. In the center of the blossom grows a white pistil too. They join to bring a brilliant sight.

There's a treasure that's put into hiding all about from me. For me it's like the world of nature. I seek to open a secret realm.

I learn that I have not learned but very little about the domain on every side of the garden today. The pepper and elm and jacaranda trees don't tell. I read in my dictionary: "to let go into joy/gladness for you; in your heart to put a place always; in softness to contemplate." (I've translated into Irish accordingly s.v. "to possess one's soul in patience.")

P.S. Ní bhfuair mé ghriangraf leis dordéan agus bougainvillea le chéile, ach tá sé fótograf go deas le Peter Desposito anseo leis dordéan agus bláth eile! I didn't find a photo with a hummingbird and bougainvillea together, but here's a nice photo by Peter Desposito with a hummingbird and another flower!

"Didn't you use to have a blog?"

So goes one snarky Twitter-type. "Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest" (NY Times 6/7/09) notes "blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants." Douglas Quenqua cites Technorati's 2008 survey: 95% of the 330 million blogs lay fallow the past 120 days, essentially abandoned.

With Hillary Clinton telling Barnard grads that Facebook can be used to foment global justice and Twitter for diplomacy, what of the blog? Those of us who labor away at this medium may feel our words echoing in that forest, with a few random hikers perhaps hearing us moan and muse, while most of the audience we dream about amassing stays in the cities, twittering away at the coffeehouse, texting in cubicle, logging into Facebook from her new iPhone on the San Francisco Bay ferry, as I imagine one fine blogger I link to, Lee Templeton, does regularly. (These-- all still more or less active-- blogs I'll mention in this entry can be found via my Bloglinks, scrolling down at right.)

Her evolution from a lively "Come Back Horslips" Guestbook for her website when I found it a few years ago, to a rarely updated blog of that name in my blogroll, to an energetic adaptation of Twitter (I have no interest given my aversion to cellphones) and Facebook (she uploads nearly daily photos, weblinks, and quiz results) demonstrates the shift in media by savvy players away from blogs or wordier, more static platforms to quicker, snappier, and brighter realms. The attraction of the screen and the caption over the page and the typeface continues. Facebook sensibly avoids the follies of MySpace or blog editors that allow one to desecrate wallpapers with garish fonts and pulsing backgrounds, but amidst its white space I do miss CBH's restrained, retro-late Victorian aura with witty clip art and sepia tones that evoke her own City's demi-monde, once a gaslit, bohemian culture.

But, Miss T. favors now more-frequented, less-languid beehives of activity. Her blogs remain, "The Templeton Chronicles" for her more studied reports back from her British and Irish travels, unfurled in prose that quondam Northern Californian Mark Twain might have inspired. Similarly, politics and journalism may now be hastening to social networks better suited to up-to-the-minute reporting than the stolid blog entry. While "Liberal Rapture" remains a daily stop for me, even its heated political conversations intersect more and more with the Twitter crowd who again appear to be commenting to it and feeding into it with very fresh, but then very dated, links to the day's news and videos. By its nature, a controversial exchange about current affairs under our new presidential incumbent and his loyal legions.

Carrie Twomey, who re-designed my blog about a year ago (she and Miss T. share an HTML-command I lack) moved her sharply observed efforts in an even more politically heated if less balmy locale from her co-editorship of "The Blanket" towards FB; her husband's site "The Pensive Quill" has some who place comments there yearning for a return to the activism that made "The Blanket" prominent. But editor Anthony McIntyre insists that the times have changed and feeds now his TPQ site via Twitter and Facebook. You can see from some who post comments that they're tapping away at tiny keyboards in their haste to respond whereas when I met Carrie a dozen years ago, it was on a combative Irish discussion list, full of bitter and biting e-mails that I'd get in a daily digest.

As ideologies changed, activists soured or were shunted aside, and leaders of the discussion lists altered in their own allegiances, each IRL-list that succeeded the original one became more Marxist. Those of us unwilling to proclaim ourselves yesterday's radicals eventually with the rise of the Good Friday Agreement and the changes in the North of Ireland found ourselves shut out of a dynamic, intelligent forum where we could post and comment and discover what we needed. With the millennium, the need for such lists, as eventually with the subsequent, eloquent solution "The Blanket" itself after it served most of this past decade, faded.

Now, a FB group can pop up to rally a cause, perhaps confirming Hilary's prediction of how social justice for our times may take root. Alan Jones with his blog "Independence Cymru" for Welsh issues models this nexus for pan-Celtic movements. The other day, I put up a link on my page for all my 59 "Friends" to see that linked to a StopStarbucks.com campaign that I read about in the NY Times. I've diminished what quizzes I take, lessened my visits, and rarely post for all to see on FB, but this channel appeared an ideal way to hit the demographic frequenting anti-union, soulless, corporate Starbucks! Naturally, contra Ms. Clinton, my clicking consciousness-raising met with contempt from my colleagues in that caffeinated consumer cohort!

Unsurprisingly given my tendency for a quiet life spent unprofitably if philosophically mulling Big Questions, I create what my wife today sighed at-- verbose ruminations expecting more effort from audiences than watching television. I assured her that she could peruse my blog and enjoy her marathon sittings enraptured by "Jail," "Lockup" and "Lockdown" that since we got a DVD-R box for our cable enable her and the kids to fight over who records what when. Yet, my devoted spouse responded that my highfalutin' excursions into thought or its lack demanded more concentration than even that expended by her when her incarceration updates transmit.

But, she also links to a blog I like, "Lathophobic Aphasia," with witty comments about woebegone characters the author knew in Greece while teaching English, and those similar misfits he now encounters in his parallel gig at a British university. The character of "Vilges Suola" in the yellow background of this blog page, the changing but always bold, looming art as a centerpiece, the Hellenic-meets-Northern English sensibilities, the exuberance with which he chronicles language and its abuses all remind me of how my own checkered success as a college teacher-- he's but two years older than me-- find recognizable and comforting resonance from a talented man whom I've never met, six thousand miles away. And, his taste for oils of louche lounging male nudes reminds me of the differences that we all equally convey, for my blog's full of lovely (if more clothed given Google Safe Search settings) ladies among other pictorial delights!

In such ways, better than the old days of blank white boxes for discussion lists and e-mails, we can reveal our characters to readers who may become friends, those we meet face-to-face, or those we can only wonder about. Some of the people I feel closest to in interests on these blogs lack on them their real names or faces. I show my face but not my name here for the same reason I suspect VS and Bo do: we teach and we don't want our students or administrators snooping; I also blocked my Facebook profile, which after all reveals my name by its nature, so nobody I do not approve as a Friend can find me. Still, as on this blog, it's not difficult to link to places betraying my non-virtual identity. It's simply amidst litigation and fears of retaliation, a bit of layering and shell-game shuffle may thinly cloak our selves as "good enough protection" against gossiping lurkers on this Net as in our "reality."

Still, after initial reticence, we can choose who to admit to our lair. I met Miss Templeton in person after getting to know her on the CBH-GB; I met Carrie after posting on IRL-discussion lists. Most bloggers, however, with whom I correspond by the comments boxes on their entries I've not met in person. I spoke to my technology and society class about how we now find those compatible with our own tastes in ideas, music, books, and temperaments in wonderful ways that make it far more likely that generations to come will dream up clever ways to meet and mingle beyond chance meetings at parties, classrooms, bus stops, bars, or bar mitzvahs-- probably accounting for the past century's ways in which we met and moved and perhaps mated.

Steven R. McEvoy's tech-aware "Book Reviews and More" shows his ability to master all the networks, in print and on-line, to organize his interests in Catholicism, literature, computers, and reviewing. His blog organizes a lot of information in an easy to use, yet in-depth manner. Tony Bailie at "Ecopunks" and "Bo" at "Cantos of Mvtablitie" and "Expvlsion of the Blatant Beast" betray by their references their literary bents, respectively to Tony's second novel awaiting publication and Bo's Spenserian interests. You find on their pages a correlative to their personalities, as I see among other bloggers I visit. Tony's page is straightforward like mine, a photo or book cover next to the entry he reviews or composes, but he lacks the art that trails down my right-hand blog margins. It's a direct, no-nonsense page that sums up what he says neatly.

Bo likes to vary his art. A talented icon painter himself, he shuffles his imagery. His own photo collages of tarot decks, his astrological scholarship pursued at Cambridge as a fellow, his wide-ranging erudition in pagan, alchemical, spiritual, and vatic lore all make his pages unpredictably stocked but invariably learned. I came across his site when searching for Celtic illustrations for my blog. And, through the comments on his posts, I found the blog by "Vilges Suola" as another kindred spirit. The remarks to Bo may be in Irish or Welsh as often as English, although the Greek (no transliteration!) that VS incorporates is relatively scarce; Sindarin and Latin, on the other hand, have marked entries by Bo, don-in-training!

For Professor Ben Howard at his "One Time, One Meeting: The Practice of Zen," it's the WordPress blog-creator type of template that's spare and uncluttered by imagery. It fits the mood of upstate New York where its creator's columns on zazen take form. I imagine snowy, sparse, and solemn if collegiate Alfred, NY; the blog matches this.

G. R. Grove writes Welsh stories for modern readers from Colorado, and at "Tre Gwernin" the seasons pass in her vegetable garden with photos; she too knows Cymraeg and I alerted her to Bo's page; she has excellent links to Welsh and early British material. Her page also uses a Blogger layout as do I, Miss T., Tony B., VS, and Bo, but you can see how each of us tweaks a different spin to it, an identifiable personality. As Carrie's helped me here, we show how even templates suggest style.

Still, blogging has turned less the scheme to instant fame that, say, YouTube managed to be for a few rehearsed freaks, or My Space before that for Tia Tequila! Political machines with staffs and budgets like Daily Kos and Huffington Post occupy another level; they thrive no less than Perez Hilton on celebrity, scandal, stereotype, and rumor. At least my sons claim to read Kanye West's blog regularly; they do wonder as do I who exactly writes it. But, active Facebook participants, they don't read my own blog!

On a medium nearly as venerable as epistolatory e-mail (in turn following early novels like "Clarissa"!) a blog's nuanced phrases contrast: so old-school, so spartan, so stacked and slow. Today's NYT article notes how few bloggers have found financial success; most tire of telling their own stories in such an silent forest to such rare readers.

Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but “it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.” He added, “There’s a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one.”

I feel this isolation, but as a loner by choice in the real world, perhaps my low profile on line fits my identity. I doubt if Facebook, for all its caché at present (beware the fate of Friendster and the future for MySpace), can summon the gravitas of a blog. My posts get fed to FB, but for all my diligence, very few "Friends" have commented on them there; one high school classmate joined me here as a Follower and I thank him for his interest in what he confessed were rather high expectations of content. Yes, opposed to the quizzes and chatter of livelier social networks, blogs must look as musty as a library does to anybody younger than, say, me...or him!

But, I insist, given Bo's a whole generation younger than me, that a few such erudite, witty, and thoughtful writers will continue to gravitate towards a forum that uses the wonder of self-publishing with the wisdom of the self-composed. That is, as my wife's Friday posts on "CasaMurphy" reveal, the fruit of those who pause before they transmit their latest impulse by Twitter or Facebook to the world. We need, even in times of instant gratification, to learn from and listen to reflections better prepared in the moments of sought tranquility apart from the chattering classes that throng coffeehouses and blare away all around us in this increasingly wired, but also often abbreviated, dumbed-down, and shallow marketplace. Not the marketplace of ideas, nor icons, but the marketplace of idols. Figures I start this entry with today's paper and wind up with a reference to "Novum Organum" four centuries old.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Richard Weissbourd's "The Parents We Mean to Be": Book Review

It's easy to sum up this work as previous reviewers have; harder to delve into the details in "soundbite" format for this forum. I'll try to give a more comprehensive overview of each chapter to provide needed detail for readers to make up their minds about this book's relevance to their own moral challenges as encountered by parents, children, teachers, and coaches. Being a decent, respectful, compassionate person today seems harder than ever in a "big-box" culture demanding it all now.

Weissbourd surveyed students, and had students conduct surveys of their peers, and gathered what he finds is an alternative argument to those who demand tougher moral accountability without dismantling the self-esteem and self-important folderol that in the wake of the 1960s-70s pop psychology movement has invaded classrooms, Little League, parent-teacher conferences, and the insanely inflated competition for elite college admissions. Weissbourd advises a less strained, more balanced attitude that allows kids to fail more, to grow up without demanding parents, and to learn morality from how parents and other authority figures model it themselves-- no easy task.

Chapter 1 deals with "Helping Children Manage Destructive Emotions." Shame and self-hatred often emerge from over-coddling children to the extent they cannot form their own values. Chapter 2 "Promoting Happiness and Morality" urges parents that both can be attained, and that true satisfaction need not come from an Ivy League matriculation. Again, parents gain blame here for pushing kids to succeed despite the cost to their psyches at the degrees, possessions, and egotism that earlier generations never could have had, or failed to achieve.

"The Real Danger in the Achievement Craze," chapter 3 warns, is that depression, especially in adolescent girls, can result. Chapter 4 is self-explanatory, full of cases that demonstrate "When Being Close to Children Backfires." I found Chapter 5 my favorite, "Moral Adults, Moral Children," even if the attention paid to how middle-aged adults can find their morality eroding or increasing as time goes on was far too brief for such a valuable topic that could have merited a book in itself.

Chapter 6 examines how schools can assist children better in their moral cognition and demonstration of empathy; chapter 7 studies this in how parents can learn when to step up and when to hang back when it comes to sports, coaches, and their children's fellow teammates and opponents. Weissbourd's own experiences here enliven this chapter considerably, and I sense this may be an under-explored area for psychologists as well as parents and coaches themselves worthy of much more attention given the ratcheting-up of competition in much of America.

The last chapters cover "Cultivating Mature Idealism in Young People" that also recognizes the dangers of trying to change the world too much too soon for young people pushed into community service programs, and "Key Moral Strengths of Children Across Race and Culture" looks at immigrant children mainly from Asian and Latino backgrounds as well as a thoughtful look at African American expectations and child-raising techniques that differ, often in positive and affirming ways little appreciated, from the majority culture. While the decline with Americanization and assimilation in values, respect for authority, and scholastic achievement earn coverage in the chapter, again this topic deserved more concentration, given the impact of immigrants upon nearly every school district in urban and suburban areas today, as well as many rural areas formerly little exposed to such changes.

In conclusion, Weissbourd suggests three types of "moral communities": to bring in the often absent fathers, to help parents support each other, and to allow parenting to become more shared among peers to promote feedback and widen the availability of optional strategies for dealing with discipline, vulnerabilities, and to encourage openness while respecting the need for children as they grow to find their own way that may diverge from the parental expectations.

My wife found a "New Yorker" mention of Weissbourd's work and read it; she encouraged me to do the same. I review a lot of books for Amazon, but this is the first parenting one; this is outside my usual range or interests. Therefore, I found the contents intriguing, but often the points I wanted more depth on were raised, considered for a page or a paragraph, and then the author went on to other subjects. For instance, an observation on how many parents in a secular age lack therefore religious backup or accessible models in making or enforcing morality for themselves and their families deserved elaboration.

Weissbourd's efficiently summarizing his previous research and that of his colleagues, as the well-documented endnotes demonstrate. But, there may have been a reliance on assembling material already published into book form that may account for the uneven concentration given what were for me essential topics deserving more coverage than the two-hundred pages of readable if brisk text can offer.

He tallies up the problems of cheating, selfishness, and abdication by many parents and children of moral responsibilities in a misguided push to succeed at all costs. Growing wealth allows many to indulge themselves more. "The pursuit of happiness" expectation promised in the Declaration of Independence mixes toxically with our self-interest directed in the wrong direction as far as others' welfare is concerned. Too many of us obsess over our satisfactions and avoid any involvement in what dissatisfies us or what cannot live up to our unrealistic, bull-headed, and selfish expectations. Weissbourd provides a way out of a culture of excess and envy; perhaps few parents will read this, but it's a valuable, if often underelaborated, handbook of observations that offer constructive criticism of how parenting, acquisition, and trophies have all spoiled this generation of incessant wannabee overachievers young and not-so-young. (Posted to Amazon US 6-4-09.)

Socialist Shavuot

Blintzes, loved by wife and older son, sit in the fridge. Me and younger son passed. The cheese, dairy treat reminded me about Shavuot, the forgotten Jewish holiday.

Fifty days after Passover, after "counting the omer," the day arrives with little theophany, although as I type this there's a rare June thunderstorm that might dimly echo that supposed to have resounded around Sinai at the giving of the Torah, the offer the Jews found they could not refuse. Strange that the dancing around the scrolls at temples at Simchat Torah, the "joyous" reception of the Law, comes only in the autumn, after the High Holy Days. In the spring, it's a muted, barely registered celebration, similar to that for the winter crops of fruits and nuts of Tu b'Shevat, which unless you're a Jewish Renewal hippie-type, gets little press today outside of preschools eager to enliven Torah however they can! One reason the winter harvest may garner less attention may be its atypically healthier fare; why Shavuot suffers equal neglect given the usual cholesterol-laden delights puzzles me.

Four articles in the Forward's "May 29, 2009 issue" relate directly or tangentially this overlooked late spring holiday's relevance. (We get the venerable paper at least a week late mailed from NYC.) I don't count two more on cheese and cheesecake outside the opinion section! Shavuot, as the "Leave the Gleanings" unsigned editorial reminds us, is not only the spring harvest holiday (every season has one in Judaism, all marked by different foods, practically and appealingly) but the anniversary of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. I recall the tradition that the Hebrews only took on the burden of the Law after seventy nations rejected it; another tale tells how Sinai was dangled over the crowd as an "incentive." The bargain, as the Hebrews shouted back in apparent agreement after this closer, first to "do" what the Law commanded, only later, after acting upon the commandments, to "understand" all 613. You do it, and it begins to make sense even if it doesn't make much sense. Rabbis ever since have so explained this imperative so phrased, a bit easier to comprehend by this routine than why observant men thank G-d each morning that they were not born women! (Although in this same issue, the moderate Orthodox Yeshiva U. will now accept women for "rabbinic clergy," a nicely phrased or controversial alternative to "rabbi.")

The Forward's editorial writer remarks that there's no ritual for Shavuot, alone among biblical festivals. No special meal (only blintzes). But, the spring harvest does come, as so much of Torah, with fine print for "a specific code of behavior." "Doing" comes first, then the Jewish people try to "understand" it for 3000 years. Action in Judaism makes it a rugged religion for the crowd rather than for the recluse. It's full of legalisms, provisos, haggling, and compromise. One wonders how the Eternal Power can be credited with its authorship, given its insistence on jots and tittles. In such hashing it out and hechshering it after its beaten to death, rabbinic and subsequent Talmudic and yeshiva-based interpretations thrive on iotas.

Here's one command, however, pretty straightforward, with little room to negotiate. Leviticus 23 enjoins Jews to let go the "gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger. I am the Lord." The editorial reasons "that the harvest you're celebrating isn't yours alone." Out of this comes the rationale that we are to put aside part of what we glean, or gather, or acquire, for the poor-- even if we don't know who will come along to pick up the windfall and the leftovers. Wealth redistribution makes Shavuot a reminder of the socialism that for so long has inspired, long before Proudhon or Marx, Engels or Robert Owen, a basic Jewish drive to share wealth "throughout your generations"-- no expiration, no ifs, ands or buts.

Private property in the next chapter also gets a Forward socialist makeover; that jubilee year every fifty springs annuls land purchases so property reverts to its original owner. "Large property holdings may be amassed only temporarily," the editorial summarizes. "Enduring wealth, like enduring poverty, is impermissible."

An aside. The L.A. Times every day announces another philanthropic award given by or received by Donald Sterling, owner of garish high-rises that regularly mar our skylines in the pricier stretches of my rat-race city, I thought of what must drive this man to proclaim in full-page color ads his largess. Is it to make up for charges that he's discriminated against blacks in housing, so that as owner of the Clippers (about as forlorn in the NBA as Shavuot among favorite festivals) he has to now make amends to every African American leader in town at an endless series of banquets alongside Our Smiling Mayor? Or, as a Jewish millionaire, does Sterling, a name well chosen at Ellis Island, demonstrate true conviction to give back to his community a portion left from his immense wealth as a public form of amendment, a necessary nod to gleaning? I may not like him, but I realize that I cannot judge him.

Next to the editorial, columnist Leonard Fein protests the crackdown on Palestinian commemoration of their dispossession of their land in what they refer to as the "Nakba" or "catastrophe" of 1948 when Israel won its independence. Of course, the reversion of property and land, back to beyond fifty to, well, sixty-two years ago to Palestinians would divest Jews of much of their holdings, to say the least. I suppose Leviticus applies to the Hebrews themselves, for they had to take their land by force from the ancestors of today's Hamas and Fatah enemies, the Philistines and Phoenicians, however you render that ancient Levantine people's name.

Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg over on the next page explores the "covenantal reminder" of Shavuot in reference to the "tikkun olam" ideal of "perfecting the world." He contrasts its peaceful method with the violent ones promoted over the past two centuries. Revolution, he notes, has killed, hurt, and oppressed "in the name of equality and progress" more people than ever before.

The Torah provides an alternative. God says to the Jews: "I, appointed you a covenant people, a light to the nations." (Isaiah 42:6) Jews must live up to their role model to show the rest of the world a peaceful way that relies not on God forcing humans to be good (Sinai upended over the crowd?) nor on a magical deity eliminating evil. "Humans must participate in their own liberation."

Finally, an Israeli government minister, Ephraim Sneh, reminds his audience of the limits of doves vs. hawks when it comes to expecting Zion to trust its neighbors in the pursuit of rabbinical visions and mutual respect among nations seeking light. Sneh chides the peace camp for unrealistic optimism when surrounded by Iran with its control over oil and gas pipelines, nuclear weapons, and terror exported to those who surround Israel. The present or future boundaries of the Palestinian state reveal its character: "Will it be a Taliban-like state or a modern, democratic one? Will there be a cinema in Nablus? Will folklore festivals be permitted in Quaqilya? Will the beach in Gaza be open simultaneously to men and women? There is no compromise between these two visions for Palestinian society. That is why reconciliation talks between Hamas and Fatah fail time and again," Sneh explains.

As another aside, for I wrote this entry before Obama's Cairo speech yesterday, it'll be intriguing to follow the Jewish press reaction-- in Israel, referred to not as the Jewish state or nation, but "homeland," and among the "Palestinian resistance." Obama's obviously far beyond playing it safe pre-election to our homeland's Christian crowd. While his speech understandably omitted the fact his Muslim father later became an atheist and that his mother disdained religion, the talk does show Obama's swerve away from the pro-Israel policies that have dominated the past sixty years in Washington. Well, the voters asked for change, and this is one crucial move away from the status quo and what's been labelled the "Jewish lobby."

While nearly all American Jews idolize Obama, I wonder if this speech will inspire anguish among those whom, like Sneh, have to live in Zion. As a former defense minister, he demographically and militarily fears for Israel's future. Will those in Israel-- Arab, Christian, Jews of all sorts-- benefit from our president's appeal to live and let live? Obama did chide the Arab world for its Holocaust denial, and he did include the nod to the suffering that preceded, accompanied, and follows the establishment of Israel. For such a ecumenical view, Leonard Fein and The Forward's editorial writers I figure will be ecstatic over the president's message for compromise and tolerance; Rabbi Greenberg may balance support of these values with caution, I predict, in his nuanced, eloquent fashion.

So, a typically Jewish conclusion in which nothing's concluded. Four opinions not to mention two cheesecake recipes (or Obama's speech, which I did mention and which cites Torah as the way of peace) as relevant reminders of how open-ended can and must be the application of Jewish reminders of our human obligation to help those weaker than ourselves. Hebrew covenants confront us, Forward readers, and Obama's audience. They command us just as three thousand years ago these rules did a nation also threatened by jealous rivals and intolerant sectarians.

Still, the human frailties cause if not the Creator than His chosen people to rally around the need for food to accompany any festival. They volunteered, if under mythical duress of geological upheaval, for the duty of upholding the Law, so it's only right they earn some of the perks, like getting to choose the menu each special meal each special season. It's telling that despite the manifold woes of the Hebrews then and now, they speak of so rich a harvest that the remainders can be left on the ground. For the poor, who as Jesus reminded us will always be with us, picking up the scraps, waiting to be comforted, begging for a denarius with Caesar's image upon it or a humbler offering of a widow's mite.

Photo: Blintzes do remind me of rolled-up Torah scrolls. "Brief entry on Shavuot." Sweets are eaten to commemorate the entrance into the "land of milk and honey." Two challahs instead of one, as well.

Beckett, Bees, Buddhism, Beavis & Butt-Head: "Sam I Am"

This "New Yorker" 2006 centenary essay on Beckett elegantly encapsulates the man who sought minimal expression, subtracting rather than expanding as Joyce, shifting to French to force himself into restricted vocabulary. Benjamin Kunkel sums him up well, never better than in his two concluding paragraphs:

Beckett’s work can lay a strong claim to universality: not everyone has a God, but who doesn’t have a Godot? Still, when it comes to exegesis, we are mostly putting words into a mouth constantly engaged in spitting them out. The bizarre horror in Beckett provokes such glib formulations as that of the Nobel Prize committee: Beckett “has transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltation.” But much of the forlornness of the frightening spaces in Beckett—- the little rooms, the blasted heaths, the madhouses, the ditch in the rain, the country road with its one tree, the little glass jar near the slaughterhouse, and all the sequestered, jesting minds—- is that these are sites forsaken by meaning, bereft of sense. For agoraphobes, there is, in Beckett, the wide vacancy of the universe; for claustrophobes, there’s the bounded nutshell of the self, plied with bad dreams. It’s Beckett’s trick to allow you to feel the terrors of both emptinesses at once. And yet meaning always returns to the hole it has been torn from; interpretation probes the bareness of these works as insistently as a tongue returning to where the tooth was.

“I do not know this author,” Beckett said when he looked at “The Unnamable” a few years before his death, an admission from which critics could learn something. Take an idea to a page of Beckett, and usually the page will reject it. It will, however, give forth abundant mirth, fascination, fear, and pleasure. There is a moment in “Molloy” when Moran is attempting to drag himself home, where he hopes to see again his bees dancing near their hive. He describes at length the mysterious buzzing dance of the bees, controlled by “determinants of which I had not the slightest idea.” It may be the happiest, most fruitful moment in Beckett: “And I said, with rapture, Here is something I can study all my life, and never understand.”

The challenge, Kunkel begins his essay, lies with how we all want to push back into the minimalist prose what Beckett took out. The dialogue his monologists as well as his interlocutors delight in, creating on the page what lingers in the mind or passes across the limelight as fleetingly, allows us to recreate what time obliterates. As with Krapp and his tapes, we can hauntingly recover a voice-- but not the girl in the boat or the Kerry Blue terrier (see photographed the pair above, albeit author and dog, not girl or boat or dog and Krapp) once loved.

Looking for this photo, I came across this footnote at the Wikipedia entry on "Krapp's Last Tape." #30. D. Katz, "Beckett's Measures: Principles of Pleasure in Molloy and First Love", Modern Fiction Studies 49.2 (Summer 2003): 246-260: "Collating the accounts of Beckett's two major recent biographers, it seems that in 1926 Beckett ran over and killed his mother's Kerry Blue bitch."

Out of such tragic impermanence, we build our spiritual craft to ride in. Will it be haunted by ghosts? Can we escape the "prison-house of language," the obscurities that both Joyce's maximal- and Beckett's minimum-security fortresses of thought and word constructed around us, within their bindings, to lure and capture us as well?

I stumbled upon the Kunkel piece, which I enjoyed three years ago, when searching for "Beckett Buddha." Only a few cyber-references beyond coincidental juxtaposition merit repetition. As Kunkel notes, the crucial one's from a book I found that he found, in an appropriate venue: One of the most purposely obscure writers of the last century has become all things to all people. On my bookshelf I also have a volume that I picked up as a nineteen-year-old trekker in Kathmandu: “Beckett and Zen.” Since Beckett got from Schopenhauer what Schopenhauer had found in Buddhism, the connection is not far-fetched. And, come to think of it, a long practice of za-zen might be required before we could so empty our minds as to open up one of Beckett’s texts and hear simply the words that are there.

I looked up "Beckett & Zen" not in Nepal but via Wisdom Publisher's site. I note the British copy's of Paul Foster's 1989 study's on sale for half-off; the American one's only 20% discount! Impecuniously, I've xeroxed an interlibrary loan; it may be his 1980 dissertation all over, but it's profound and meticulous-- from a long-time Zen practitioner returned to academia. The Wisdom website, fittingly, keeps rather mum about the contents of this exegesis of the writer's "dilemma in the novels." In time, given the density and pace of Foster's critique, I will review it here and on Amazon US-- which lists the author in a cosmic joke its inspiration may be chuckling over as I type, "RAND Corporation." Talk about chaos theory! There's yet another 1999 monograph, by John L. Kundert-Gibbs, that combines Zen with chaos in Beckett.

Lawrence Shainley's "Exorcising Beckett" finds the scholar disappointed. The author's dismissed any explicitly Zen interpretation of the futility shown for the protagonist (as literal puppet for this dramatization) in "Act Without Words." Beckett makes no mistake: his character's not liberated at the end, but "finished."

Finally, an article in the mysteriously titled "International Journal for Field-Being" out of what I thought was a Jesuit insitution, Fairfield U. in Connecticut, has Albert Shansky's 2001 paper on "Buddhist Motives in the Prose of Samuel Beckett". It's a brisk overview of basic Buddhism applied to the works up to the trilogy, not as far as Foster, who also tackles the formidable "How It Is." Neither Foster nor Shansky include, probably logically or out of weariness, the "dramaticules" that may look like prose but sound like verse.

Speaking of scholars, Kunkel's 8/7/06 "Sam I Am" alas does not cite my 2005 essay in "Beckett, Joyce, and the Art of the Negative" (Colleen Jaurretche, ed. European Joyce Studies 16; Amsterdam; Rodopi, 2005: 109-24), but we share the two nouns of his subtitle: "Beckett's private purgatories." He focuses on the prose rather than the plays, and argues that while much of his fiction's harder on the eye, it merits reconsideration for moments as transformative as that of "Molloy" with Moran's wonder at those unknowable bees. I read the other day-- perhaps in Alexander Theroux who seems the one who does know what the rest of us do not at least about such colorful matters-- that bees see in blue and yellow. What a universe they witness.

(See also my matched blog post yesterday, relating Stephen Batchelor's "Buddhism Without Beliefs" to random Beckettiana: "Notes Found in the Back of a Used Beckett Anthology.")

Illustration: That previous Beckett-meets-Buddhist piece featured Calvin & Hobbes as its icon; this time, why not another duo of animated philosophers on life's passing parade: "Beavis & Butt-Head"? Dana Stevens juxtaposed at Slate, the key search terms du jour in this 12/18/05 entry about the series re-released on DVD:

In the making-of featurette (irresistibly titled "The Taint of Greatness"), one of the show's writers reflects on the unique challenges of "writing stupid": "You have to go back to the place where thinking begins and stay there." To truly appreciate Beavis and Butt-Head, you have to watch from a similar place, a Zen rock garden of peaceful imbecility. There's an almost Beckett-like purity to the tedium of Beavis and Butt-Head's serenely empty lives; in one short, "Killing Time," the boys wait out the two hours until something good comes on TV by staring at the gas meter outside Butt-Head's house. "Time sucks," Butt-Head finally observes. Beavis' response: a chuckle, then silence.

(Screen-capture from Wikipedia; hard to find a Godot landscape to place our duo within, but maybe "One Tree Hill" might help here? Not U2's song.)

P.S. Bees need our help. So, please buzz by "Help the Honey Bees".

Notes found in the back of a used Beckett anthology

"In each moment there is a question, made up of smaller questions, made up of smaller sub-questions, divided by both the senses and by experience, held together by emotion, logic, reason...Herein lies the playground of the mind, to seek understanding, weighing each answer according to its source, and only by the receipt of information are these moments connected. If by chance the answers aren't enough, or the questions not right, there is no space between then and now, and certainly no time to tell the difference. There is only repetition. Question everything. Experience the best of everything. Forget the questions and remember how you asked them."

These words were very neatly inscribed, as if in a handwriting-imitative font in their precision, at the back of what Layne rescued for me from the children's theatre's abandoned shelves of books, among them the once-ubiquitous utopian 60s picture book of "The Family of Man," Dan Brown's "Angels & Devils," a tattered "The Book" by Alan Watts, the usual thrillers, diet and self-help remainders, decaying tomes of eighty years ago, a random encyclopedia volume, and a photojournalist's display of "Women Under Apartheid." The Beckett's a newer printing than my fragile secondhand one, with a better cover and "acid-free paper," of the 1976 "I Can't Go On, I'll Go On" cheerily titled "A Samuel Beckett Reader."

It has "Godot," naturally, but also a hint of poetry, his "Dante" essay and his early story with the same name, the often overlooked "The Expelled" and "First Love" (his short stories from mid-century I find unjustifiably rather neglected), part one of "Molloy," a little "Unnamable," (why is it spelled such?) and snips from "Watt," "Murphy," and a few plays; I note "Krapp's Last Tape," which reminds me of a Mark E. Smith title. He already used "Repetition" for one of his very first tunes!

Richard Seaver, Beckett's editor, provided a marvelous thirty-five page introduction-reminiscence which I highly recommend. I am not sure if-- when I wrote my small contribution to the heap of commentary on our most discussed author, with the exception of Joyce, of the last century, on "Beckett's Purgatories" published about six years ago-- I noted then Seaver's final reflection:

"For in his dimming landscape, peopled with clowns and misfits, has-beens and ne'er-do-wells, the malformed and the deformed, those on the threshold of death or already on the other side ("I don't remember when I died"), he has created a stark world far different from our own, hardly recognizable, a nether world, a purgatory, or perhaps Antepurgatory, having nothing whatsoever to do with us.

Our world." (xlv)

Those anonymous words penned in the retrieved copy, not sure-- given my present ignorance and lack of time to find out all I wonder about-- if they're from Beckett's oeuvre. They may have escaped from the nameless reader's mind, commonplace book or thespian mentor. Wherever they originated, they reminded me of the little book I'd been studying in that same setting.

Layne and I sat at the theatre next to my wife as we waited out the three-hour-plus Shakespearean-length performance of the kids' play a few Saturday nights ago. I was trying to scrutinize in the dim tracklight a series of reflections by agnostic Stephen Batchelor. (His "Buddhism Without Beliefs" earned a review in this blog earlier this week. I had a slight backlog of blogposts I saved up. So as not to put out a bewildering series of Buddhist entries in a row, I've been interspersing them from my reading with other topics, but of course, me being me, overlaps and intersects and collisions ensue.)

Batchelor, a former Zen and Tibetan (a rare combination of stripped-down and gussied-up?) monk argues for dismissing the clutter around Buddha, karma, rebirth, gurus, and temples. He favors a therapeutic approach akin to a psychologist in his non-denominational, non-theistic guidance. He admits we as with the Buddha do not know what happened or will happen regarding our place in the universe.

He leaves it at that and goes on to push us past sterility, ritual, and codified belief into a bold acceptance of a mature, democratic, and communally responsible morality that renews what has frozen into mantra, temple, and guru. He proposes a confrontation rather than consolation, derived not from salvation or reward but existential honesty. Layne opened up Zoe Heller's novel "The Believers," which to my surprise opened with a perfectly relevant insight from Antonio Gramsci: "The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned."

I didn't expect the Italian Marxist philosopher to grace with a epigram a story about an Orthodox Jewish family's debates, but I find-- the title, duh-- that the novel's all about trying to come to grips with doubts in a society where some recover traditional values and others reach for contemporary starkness, perhaps akin to a harsh lyric by The Fall or a Beckett poem, the pleasures sought by the comparative few. We place The Fall or Beckett in a nebulous "post-modern, post-punk" realm where one speaks of his or her frustration with our culture, our inheritance of ideas, our place in the economic, religious, and political superstructure that towers over us to perhaps crush us. I lack expertise in Gramsci, but I dimly recall he's on to exactly this same post-modern, existential, ideological predicament. How do we go on when we feel we can't go on? How long, O Lord, how long, as the Psalmist once cried out?

Batchelor now joins prominent skeptics, of course, but I suspect from the Scotsman's past in Korean and Tibetan monasteries that his journey towards bracing if discomforting diminishing of truth that we can seek and never cling to took him too from a youth trying to renew tradition-- during perhaps the counter-cultural heyday? His book, to its credit, does not boast about his own revision of his beliefs into their negation. He erases himself to let us into his insights. There, in the heart and mind where true messages wait, he found that, as the Buddha and Jesus both warned, outward displays of piety as Pharisees and lamas, popes and preachers, imams and gurus may indulge in may well cloak only hollowness inside the empty idol worshipped.

(My bedtime reading that kept me up past midnight four nights straight, Martha Sherrill's "The Buddha from Brooklyn," [reviewed by me on Amazon US and here] examines the risks of such veneration. It's as far from Batchelor's vision as the Vatican's from a Quaker house of prayer. A New Age healer becomes singled out by a visiting Tibetan lama as an reincarnated holy woman. Current emanation of suburban middle-class often-divorced, often-remarried, eventually bisexual mom takes on, so to speak, much more than the outward trappings of what becomes a "tulku" most. Credit cards, black leather, tight jeans, and Lee Press-On nails help spread in her curious justification her message to those who will see her name on the bills she generates therefore will earn merit. She gains a $10k monthly income, half the budget of the temple, tax-free thanks to the service and sweat tithed by those who turn from once getting tipsy with their gal-pal to prostrating themselves before "Jetsunma" in the "guru deity" practice and Correct View obedience for living versions of enlightened beings. Such earnest and exhausting (both financially and physically) veneration delights most of her awed or cowed-- and disgusts a few of her weary and cheated-- followers at soon America's largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in 90's Maryland. Sherrill pushes beyond this [un]tidy exposé, however.)

Batchelor's brief but weighty book (I already reviewed it, #104, on Amazon US where for a dozen years it's provoked debate) can be read by anyone, and I think secular and atheist readers might benefit most. In a section on "emptiness," that fundamental teaching of the dharma, he tells us how:

"much of the time we fail to register what is happening here and now. We are reliving an edited version of the past, planning an uncertain future, or indulging in being elsewhere. Or running on automatic pilot, without being conscious at all.

And instead of a coherent personality that stretches back into an unbroken line to a first memory and looks forward to an indefinite future, we discover a self ridden with gaps and ambiguities. Who "I am" appears coherent only because of the monologue we keep repeating, editing, censoring, and embellishing in our heads. (24)

He adds later that we are less the hero of a B-movie starring ourselves but as "more akin to the complex and ambiguous characters who emerge, develop, and suffer across the pages of a novel. There is nothing thinglike about me at all. I am more like an unfolding narrative." (82) Becoming aware of this impels us towards an "ethics of empathy," refusing to cling to habits and routines. We cannot hold on to our ego (cf. Brian Wilson?) to sustain our fragile and evanescent self; rather, Batchelor urges: "Instead of taking ourselves so seriously, we discover the playful irony of a story that has never been told in quite this way before." (83)

Whether the lyrics of The Fall, an article I penned on purgatory and liminality, a happenstance scrawl in a secondhand book, or my current choice between the covers, we all seek, as I do, to construct out of what we find around us our world-view. We try to make "sense" out of the facts and images and sounds and sights in and out of our heads, waking and dreaming. They float away, as insubstantial, but the words remain, as Smith, Batchelor, Beckett, and even the Buddha know, to guide others long after we die and head towards whatever "unnameable" emptiness will embrace us again.

Cartoon: Calvin & Hobbes philosophically sum up their meaning of life. Thanks to this via the superb "Samuel Beckett On-Line Resource Site & Archive Links" Of course, that assiduous compiler also found this, on a "Buddha.net link" with bits from Beckett that Buddhists liked. Out of five pages of observations by various hands (Emily Dickinson's three poems shine terribly pure), Beckett is he who dies with the most quotes wins.

(P.S. See also my matched blog post tomorrow, "Beckett, Buddha, Bees, Beavis & Butthead: 'Sam I Am'".)